In the context of local listing search engines, it is desirable for places, local businesses, and other local entities to be ranked appropriately among algorithmically derived search results if they have a strong presence and/or are popular on social network websites, e.g., Facebook®. Current methods of taking into account popularity in the process of ranking local entities are based on the web presence of the entities (for instance, the number of websites that mention the entity) or online review websites from which ratings are present in a local entity index. The first approach has at least two shortcomings. First, the web presence is based on the appearance of a local entity among the results of a web search engine, which is limited by the coverage of the search engine itself, and which does not consider whether the entity is negatively or positively mentioned. Second, while social networks are an increasingly important part of the web, a popular entity on such networks does not necessarily have a strong presence on the “regular” web. A shortcoming of the second approach is that it requires the local entity data source to provide the ratings.